Dr Hermes Reviews – ROBERT E. HOWARD
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JAMES ALLISON

"The Garden of Fear" (Jan 16, 2007) From the July 1934 issue of the fanzine MARVEL TALES, this is one of the eight stories Robert E Howard wrote about the past lives of James Allison. Inspired heavily by Jack London's THE STAR ROVER, Howard's series involved a crippled Texan waiting to die from a long drawn-out disease. His only comfort is that he is able to relive previous incarnations as vividly as when they first occurred. Being twisted, I would find it amusing if one of these stories went astray and told of an earlier life that involved a slicker selling homemade soap and notions on the frontier, possibly with some misunderstanding about a farmer's daughter. But no, that's not what Howard was interested in telling; and each episode instead takes us back to dim distant eras when beefy barbarians left corpses behind them like footprints. (There's an inconsistency here as James Allison is dying from a terminal illness and has no idea why he can access past lives. In "Marchers of Valhalla" he was given his flashback power by the immortal woman Ishtar and he was bitter because he lost a leg early in life. Being a fanboy from way back, I can handwave this. Memory of meeting Ishtar quickly faded as she is not meant to be known to mortal men; and Allison not only lost a leg in his youth, he later contacted a fatal disease as well, being a hardluck sort of guy.) "The Garden of Fear" is a bit less epic than the other installments, with no armies of men wiping each other out. This time, Allison is remembering the gig he had as Hunwulf, "a son of the golden-haired Aesir, who, from the icy plains of shadowy Asgard, sent blue-eyed tribes around the world in century-long drifts to leave their trails in strange places." You might notice Howard's trick of using recognizable names from mythology like Aesir and Asgard (and later, Hunwulf kills a man named Heimdul). This is acceptable to me, although a philologist would likely scoff in disdain. The familiar names carry appropriate connotations and are more euphonic than the usual made-up jumbles like Karg Gumbak or M'F'elgsh. So we're back in the days of the generally discredited Aryan Drift (a favorite theme of Howard), following Hunwulf's wanderings. With him is his main squeeze Gudrun, also blonde and blue-eyed and homicidal. In fact, they had to leave their tribe suddenly when Hunwulf liberated Gudrun from another man's clutches through some improvised skull surgery with a flint-headed axe. Hunwulf and Gudrun, two crazy kids in luv, wander all over creation until they are taken in by "a peaceful, brown-skinned people" who welcome them. Even as these villagers are trying to get across (despite the language barrier) that some terrible danger is near, Hunwulf suddenly is smacked headlong in a tumble. Some dark form swooping down with the sound of great wings has sucker-punched him and carried off Gudrun. As he trudges in grim pursuit, Hunwulf passes some of the colorful fauna of that age (which, frankly I'm just as glad are not skulking around our backyards these days). He strides past cave bears and sabretooths and a herd of immense mammoths grazing complacently. In a valley surrounded by cliffs, Hunwulf finds a strange cylindrical tower of green stone reared up within a field of odd flowers. And here's where things get dodgy. The inhabitant of the tower is a tall muscular man whose skin is "black with the hue of polished ebony: (but he does not have African-descent features), and the reason the tower has no doors at ground level or stairs leading up to the balcony is quite easily explained... the stranger has huge batlike wings. As if this set-up wasn't inconvenient enough, the field of flowers guarding the tower is made up of vampire plants. Tending his garden, the batman flies out and drops a captive villager. The plants promptly suck the poor guy dry, leaving a pale dessicated corpse. Howard describes the vampire plants in some detail. They wiggle and lunge like tentacles, have curved hooks on their leaves and tiny sucking mouth on heir petals to draw the blood down into the stalks. (Ewww) Tough and determined as he is, Hunwulf realizes he won't be able to reach the tower before the flowers drag him down and drink his blood to the last drop. But even though he's a primitive savage and proud of it, Hunwulf does have cunning and imagination. He recalls passing something on his way into the valley that might be just what he needs... "The Garden of Fear" is interesting in that it touches on the difference between good old Hunwulf back in the dawn of tall blue-eyed blondes and poor unhappy James Allison moping on his bed in modern Texas. Allison imagines what wonders the tower must have held, what history of the batwinged race and secrets of sorcery or ancient science were hidden there. If he had a chance, he would have found a way to decipher the inscriptions and parchments in the tower. Not Hunwulf. He'll be happy if he can sink his axe in the batman's frontal lobe, reclaim Gudrun, and then make tracks outta there. This story also revisits one of Robert E Howard's repeating menaces, the winged manlike being. Similar critters turned up in the novel ALMURIC, the Conan story "Queen of the Black Coast" and (my favorite variation) the monsters that Solomon Kane tackles in "Wings In the Night." They bring back memories of Harpies, angels and demons from various mythologies, and the old saw that legends have their basis in some half-forgotten fact. Along with giant snakes and killer apes, winged men fascinated Howard and stirred up unusually intense writing (even for him). My only misgiving is that the story ends a smidgen too abruptly, and a longer confrontation between Hunwulf and the batman might have been more satisfying.

"Marchers of Valhalla" (Oct 21, 2006) Here's an ambitious story that reveals a lot about Robert E Howard (maybe more than he realized), with a number of his favorite themes and images. It also has a wonderfully evocative concept, the idea of Old Texas – a huge area of the state with its own ancient civilization that was lost when a chunk of land slid into the Gulf of Mexico in the Atlantis sort of way. ("Once the Great Plains stretched to the Gulf. Long, long ago what is now the state of Texas was a vast upland plateau, sloping gently to the coast, but without the breaks and shelvings of today.") "Marchers of Valhalla" was never published during Howard's lifetime (but is available today in several paperbacks). It was one of a group of eight stories he worked up around 1933, all involving the visions of James Allison about his earlier incarnations. Howard swiped the idea was inspired by Jack London's 1915 novel THE STAR ROVER (a wild book in itself), although he dropped London's biting social commentary and philosophizing in favor of sword-swinging carnage. We start with James Allison moping around the post-oak terrain, absolutely wallowing in bitter self-pity. It seems a horse rolled over him when he was young, and one leg had to be amputated (his, not the horse's). Since then, Allison has been lost in brooding over what exciting lives his ancestors led killing Mexicans and Indians to claim their land, which fun he himself has missed out on. As he's mulling this over, an exotic-looking woman turns up. She tells him that he has forgotten much that he will now remember and off he drifts into the mists of ancestral memory. Suddenly he is once again Niord, a hulking mass of muscle, bone and shaggy blonde hair, plundering the ancient world. This is the same Niord we meet in "The Valley of the Worm", with the same Pict buddy (those Picts again!). However, since Niord meets a violent death in both that story and this one, Glenn Lord pencilled in the name Hialmar here. Presumably, if Howard had sold these stories, he would have made a few similar changes. We're back in the period of the Aryan Drift, a concept once well regarded but now fallen in disrepute. According to this theory, hordes of blue-eyed blondes poured out of northern Europe at some primordial time and swept over the world, stepping on all the brown- and yellow-skinned people who got in their way. Howard absolutely loved this idea. It turns up in variations throughout his work, but here there's an interesting twist. Usually, Howard's wandering Aryans (here known as the AEsir) are a large tribe making their way around the globe, with babies being born along the way to replace those who fall. This time, though, it's essentially a stag party. Niord is part of an all-male army which starts out a thousand strong. They march through the Middle East and India and Asia, up across the Bering Strait and down into North America, preoccupied entirely with killing everyone they meet. (Howard evidently agrees with his hero that this is glorious and intoxicating, what any real man craves in his heart). By the time they reach Old Texas, there are only about five hundred of them left. I'm dubious about the likelihood of a group this size staying together all the years it would take to trudge across Asia and down into North America, without breaking up or at least gathering a group of captive women and infants with them. As it is, most of these guys must be getting a bit grey and arthrtitic. Our blonde brutes find themselves nearing an impressive city, Khemu, with walls eighty feet high. To be fair, they do approach peacefully and their leader Asgrimm stands with open palms held up as a gesture of friendliness. But an arrow snips down near them from the oncoming group of warriors and that's all it takes to let the dogs out. The AEsir hurtle to meet the party from Khemu and it's all-out slaughter as their superior strength and viciousness overwhelms the cityfolk. "Who said the ordered discipline of a degenerate civilization can match the sheer ferocity of barbarism?" (Well, the Romans had a decent track record.) The Khemuans retreat and try to negotiate a peace, offering tribute and food and wimmins. Grizzled old Asgrimm is not moved by this. "The kisses and love-cries of women fade and pall, but the sword sings a fresh song with each stroke," he says. "Is it the false lure of women, or the bright madness of slaughter?" This guy seems like a serious psycho to me, but the younger men in his band think the idea of getting some female booty company really hits the spot and he grudgingly concedes. The people of Khemu send out lavish food and drink, elaborate gifts and some supple young maidens, all of which are happily seized by the AEsir. But the cityfolk have their own agenda. It seems they are threatened by raiders from the south, an unknown race led by a wild white-skinned redhead. (This turns out to be one of the Vanir, the AEsir's ancient enemies,and how he ended up in Mexico is anyone's guess.) So the Khemuans retain the AESir as mercenaries and,sure enough, there is soon a massive battle against the southern invaders that satisfies anyone's craving for slaughter. (Imagine a bunch of Vikings defending an Egyptian city against attacking Toltecs.) While all this sport is going on. Hialmar has been smitten hard by one of the Khemuan slaves. This is a luscious young blonde named Aluna, who has been raised by the cruel priests. There's is some romance (as far as the crude Hialmar can allow himself to soften up), but then everything goes to hell in a hurry. The AEsir are poisoned by the Khemuans and start to hurriedly kill as many of them as they can before dying themselves. Aluna is slain (sort of inevitable in a story like this) and a frothing-mad Hialmar confronts the goddess she served – Ishtar herself. Only it turns out Ishtar is a flesh and blood woman from lost Lemuria (!?) who was granted immortality by her "husband" Poseidon. Freed by Hialmar, Ishtar calls on the sea-god to destroy Khemu. Here comes the great cataclysm that sends miles of land breaking off and crashing into the Gulf. (You think Texas is big today, it's half what it used to be.) Everybody dies! What a mess. Whew. An awful lot of ground is covered in a rather short story. Back in the present (well, 1933), James Allison snaps out of it. He realizes the woman standing there is in fact Ishtar, still alive ("You are the Eternal Woman – the root and the bud of creation – the symbol of life everlasting!") She leaves him with the knowledge that his unhappy life will not last forever and next time around, things may be better. And she has given him to ability to relive his past incarnations, escaping the present for a while. Robert E Howard touches on many of his favorite obsessions here. There's page after page of men fighting to the death, arms and heads flying in all directions, enough blood splashed to keep the Red Cross stocked for years, all the action he handled more vividly than any pulp writer I can think of. There's also reincarnation, secret history, the clash of virile barbarians (yay!)and decadent civilized people (boo!), assorted racial stereotypes slamming together – it's all here. This is almost a quintessential Howard story. If you read this as a thirteen or fourteen year old boy, it would just about knock you down with a testosterone surge. It's interesting that, as devoted as Howard was to Texas and all she stood for, he has no illusions about the hardness of life there in the Depression. It's "a dreary expanse of sand drift and post-oak thickets, checkered with sterile fields where tenant farmers toil out their hideously barren lives in fruitless labor and bitter want." Howard loved both Texas and Ireland passionately, they were both his spiritual sources, but he also seemed to regard them without any soft rosy haze of idealization.

"The Valley of the Worm" (Feb 10, 2006) Howard touches on some powerful concepts in his James Allison series. Although this story (which appeared in the February 1934 issue of WEIRD TALES) was the only one of the series sold during his lifetime, he wrote a total of eight in which a sickly man lies dying and vividly remembers his earlier incarnations. One of Howard's favorite books was Jack London's THE STAR ROVER (1915). It's a fairly grim and intense story told in the first person by Professor Darrel Standing. In prison awaiting execution for murder, Standing mentally escapes for intervals through reliving his earlier lives. (This isn't the main thrust of the story, though, which largely concentrates on exposing just how brutal and abusive prison conditions were.) The text is available in a number of places on the Net, such as http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/StarRover/toc.html. London is best remembered today for his adventure classics like CALL OF THE WILD and THE SEA WOLF, but he also wrote a lot of excellent science fiction and fantasy. Howard does not attempt to match London's muckraking sort of revelations about the prisons; that wasn't his area of interest or expertise. Instead, he focusses entirely on the heroic exploits which James Allison recalls on his sick bed. This time, he tells us of his life as the ancient Aryan warrior Niord and his challenge of the Worm. It's a story which has come down to us in many versions "wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George." But in fact, it was Niord who actually lived the adventure. Niord lived way way back in an era so long ago that archaeologists would have conniptions at the thought. Not only have glaciers come and gone, and continents risen and fallen, but "the very stars and constellations have altered and shifted." We're dealing with a subject dear to Howard's heart and imagination, the supposed wanderings of tribes of big murderous Aryan warriors all over the globe. These folk roamed the earth for ages, fighting and slaughtering and leaving split-off factions to populate the areas where they passed. All this was a popular belief in Howard's time, however much it might have fallen out of favor today, and it always seems to stir him up to some particularly vigorous writing. Strolling into a jungle land, Niord's magnificent towheads clash head-on with a race of dark, stunted apelike brunettes. Oh my God, it's the Picts again. I can't explain Howard's fascination with these guys. They have nothing to do with the real Picts of history, but seem to be some sort of quintessential savage who turn up in almost every genre he tackled. (I kind of like them myself, and their legendary king Bran Mak Morn is one of my favorite Howard characters). Of course, there is much carnage and mayhem as the two groups meet. After a typical joyful battle in which heads and limbs are hacked off, blood waters the lawn and the women come out to finish off the wounded with copper knives, the Aryans win and chase the Picts away. Interestingly, Niord spares the life of a Pict warrior who survived being cracked in the head with a bludgeon. This is in a time when mercy has not been invented, and yet for some reason he lets the Pict live, to become a sort of hesitant sidekick. Sparing Grom turns out to be a wise move, as he negotiates a truce between the two races and they more or less agree to leave each other alone. Howard is funny. He keeps starting to praise the Picts for their savagery and fighting prowess but then catches himself and reminds everyone that the blonde guys were better at it ("we won because we were the superior race, but it was no easy victory.") Niord next slays a Sabretooth in one-on-one combat, pretty impressive any way you look at it. I like Howard's explanation of why this big cat died out. (".. He vanished from the earth because he was too terrible a fighter, even for that grim age. As his muscles and ferocity grew, his brain dwindled until at last even the instinct of self-preservation vanished... He was a freak on the road of evolution - organic development gone mad and run to fangs and talons, to slaughter and destruction.") Well, if you say so, Niord. I mean, you were there at the dawn of time. I might suggest climate change, declining numbers of the megafauna that the Sabretooths preyed on, that sort of thing... but your explanation is much livelier. Then we get to the heart of the story. In a valley filled with broken stone columns and walls, where a weird piping noise can be heard, there slithers one of the biggest and nastiest monsters in creation. It's the Worm, and I won't begin to describe it, thank you. After this abomination wipes out a splinter group of the golden-haired clan, Niord solemnly vows to destroy the thing. First, he needs the venom of a snake that itself is eighty feet long, with a head bigger than a horse's. This is an epic struggle in itself, required cunning and cold nerve before he can soak his copper arrowheads in the seething acidic poison of those fangs. (This gigantic serpent itself founded legends, "... the Stygians first worshipped, and then, when they became Egyptians, abhorred him under the name of Set, the Old Serpent, while to the Semites he became Leviathan and Satan.") Then, painting his body and singing his death-song (for he does not expect to survive this challenge), Niord sets out to slay the immense brute. There are some Lovecraft-type undertones, here. The Worm is not just a simple huge animal but some unholy creature not native to this world or dimension. ("... a night-born demoniac intelligence such as men in dreams vaguely sense throbbing titanically in the black gulfs outside our material universe.") Its herald (or keeper or servant, whatever) is a hairy humanoid with red eyes who plays maddening pipes unceasingly, while dancing about. Evidently, some early prehuman race worshipped the Worm and this geek is a late survivor. ("The Old Ones had long vanished into the limbo from whence they had crawled in the black dawn of the universe, but their bestial god and his inhuman slave lived on.") The story ends on a melancholy note. It features some of the topics which spurred Robert E Howard to put extra zeal and passion in his writing, and although the parts about racial superiority don't go over well today, they can be taken in stride as part of that era's outlook. The idea that we're getting the true story behind ancient legends and religions is appealing, and the central image of a crippled man revisiting stirring action-filled past lives is a bit poignant.